When I started investing in equities, I used to be in awe of equity research reports. Immaculately formatted 5-page documents with their glossy charts and tables of financial projections followed by a confident Buy / Sell / Hold recommendation based on a precise target price. I figured those target prices were arrived at by hardcore sector experts working with proprietary excel models of such complexity they would probably crash any computer with conventional specifications. That awe lasted until I realized the “models” in use might as well have been random number generators due to their sensitivity to assumptions about an unknowable

Earlier this week, NSE announced effective Sep 29, 4 stocks (ACC, Bank of Baroda, Tata Power, Tata Motors DVR) will be dropped and 3 (Bajaj Finance, Hindustan Petroleum, UPL) will be added to the NIFTY. When analysts talk about the performance of the “Indian Stock Market”, they are typically talking about the NSE NIFTY Index, and the BSE Sensex Index (to a lesser extent). Most investors know the NIFTY consists of 50 stocks (currently 51), of the largest companies by market capitalisation trading on the Indian markets. 5 things not commonly known about the NIFTY: 5. How the NIFTY 50